1972, again?

Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away

David Brooks, Republican, asks,

I could never in a million years vote for Donald Trump. 

So my question to Democrats is: Will there be a candidate I can vote for?

For a while, he actually sounds like a center-left Democrat concerned his party is going too far left.

According to a Hill-HarrisX survey, only 13 percent of Americans say they would prefer a health insurance system with no private plans. 

Warren and Sanders pin themselves, and perhaps the Democratic Party, to a 13 percent policy idea. 

Trump is smiling.

. . . .

Second, there is the economy. 

All of the Democrats seem to have decided to run a Trump-style American carnage campaign. 

The economy is completely broken. 

It only benefits a tiny sliver. 

Yet in a CNN poll, 71 percent of Americans say that the economy is very or somewhat good. 

We’re in the longest recovery in American history and the benefits are finally beginning to flow to those who need them most. 

Overall wages are rising by 3.5 percent, and wages for those in the lowest pay quartile are rising by well over 4 percent, the highest of all groups.

Democrats have caught the catastrophizing virus that inflicts the Trumpian right. 

They take a good point — that capitalism needs to be reformed to reduce inequality — and they radicalize it so one gets the impression they want to undermine capitalism altogether.

Third, Democrats are wandering into dangerous territory on immigration. 

They properly trumpet the glories immigrants bring to this country. 

But the candidates can’t let anybody get to the left of them on this issue. 

So now you’ve got a lot of candidates who sound operationally open borders. 

Progressive parties all over the world are getting decimated because they have fallen into this pattern.

But then he sounds like a Republican who wants to pretend the class war is between the guy who stocks the shelves at the neighborhood mom and pop and the guy who owns it.

Fourth, Democrats are trying to start a populist v. populist campaign against Trump, which is a fight they cannot win. 

Democratic populists talk as if the only elite in America is big business, big pharma — the top 1 percent. 

This allows them to sound populist without actually going after their donor bases — the highly educated affluent people along the coasts.

But the big divide in America is not between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99. 

It’s between the top 20 percent and the rest.

. . . .

The debates illustrate the dilemma for moderate Democrats. 

If they take on progressives they get squashed by the passionate intensity of the left. 

If they don’t, the party moves so far left that it can’t win in the fall.

Right now we’ve got two parties trying to make moderates homeless.

Let's be clear.

We don't need Brooks' vote or the votes of the other, relatively few Republicans who want to find somebody to vote for who isn't Trump but doesn't offend their Republican values.

Republicans whose preferred candidates Trump crushed in 2016.

But we do need the votes of a lot of people who are on the whole to the left of all Republicans but to the right of, say, Bernie.

And we do need the votes of whites and males whom Obama never told were not welcome in the Democratic Party or could not continue to be welcome as candidates for the Democratic Party.

And what message are those whites and males hearing, today?

Personally, I would prefer a candidate who is both more centrist in substance and rhetoric than the AOC/Warren/Bernie types and not all three of old, white, and male.

I think that sort of candidate could and should win in a walk.

But is that the sort of candidate we will have?